Read the summary and the most important questions on Removing the fuzziness from the fuzzy front-end of service innovations through customer interactions

• 1 Introduction

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• How is the term customer interaction used?

  To denote the "interactions between service producers and the representa- tive(s) of one or more customer firms at various stages of a NSD process.’’

• What have the previous studies shown?

  That:
  

  1. A firm can benefit substantially by optimizing and improving the fuzzy front-end of an innovation process; 
  2. Customer interaction is very useful in the front-end stages of an innovation process because the front-end stages are the most information intensive;
  3. Customer interaction is even more important in service innovation because the inseparability nature of services suggests that the customers participate in the consumption and production of many services.

• What is the objective of this study?

  1. To understand the role of customer interaction in the fuzzy front-end stages of NSD.
  2. To explore how service managers use customer input and information to improve and optimize the fuzzy front-end of NSD. 

• 2 New service versus product development

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• Which characteristic is recognized as one of the most important factors as it gets at the essence of most services?

  Inseparability: the interaction between customers and service providers during the service delivery.

• 3 Fuzzy front-end of the new service/product development

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• Which formal stage-gate type development process is compromised by researchers for NSD?

  • New service strategy
    
  • Idea generation
    
  • Idea screening
    
  • Concept development
    
  • Business analysis
    
  • Service development
    
  • Market testing and commercialization 
    

• Why is of the three front-end stages, idea generation the subject of intense scrutiny in the literature?

  Because idea generation dictates all further stages of an innovation process. Despite this importance of the idea generation stage, many companies do not pay much attention to it because the idea generation is a chancy process where the ideas may be detected simply on the hunches, observations, discussions or accidents. Another reason could be that the managers are generally not sure of the best way of generating new product ideas and follow a "try it and see" approach.

• Whereby are all the front stages traditionally been characterized?

  By low levels of formalization and often remain interrelated, unstructured and uncertain.

• 4 Customer interaction in new product/service development

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• Where is the concept of lead users based on?

  On the assumption that average users have a poor ability to identify novel product attributes because they do not have real world experience with them. But the lead users are well positioned by the very same reasoning. They have real world experience with the needs that future profitable products must serve and with attributes they must contain. Thus, customer characteristics seem to be another key issue in customer interaction.

• 5 Significance of customer interaction in the front-end stages

• Why are the stages of idea generation, screening and concept evaluations more important, more complex and more time consuming than all other stages of NSD?

  Because customer requirement in the financial services industry is difficult to forecast and the service outline is difficult to assess in their early stages. Due to this complexity and fuzziness, service firms seek customers’ assistance and interact with them rather intensely in the front-end stages.

• 6 Customer activities

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• What are the customer activities in the idea generation stage?

  Describe needs, problems and possible solutions; suggest desired features, benefits and preference in a new service via brainstorming or focus group sessions; identify financial problems not solved by the existing services; evaluate existing services by suggesting likes and dislikes; identify gaps in the market; provide a new service wish list.